Now we are here at home, in the little nation of our marriage, swearing allegiance to the table we set for lunch or the windchime on the porch, its easy dissonance. Even in our shared country, the afternoon allots its golden lines so that we’re seated, both in shadow, on opposite ends of a couch and two gray dogs between us. There are acres of opinions in this house. I make two cups of tea, two bowls of soup, ...
It’s a Michael Lewis book. That alone, is enough for me to tell you to go read it. Kahneman and Tversky’s work has probably been the biggest influence on my life in recent years, since Taleb.1 We cannot think in probabilities in our daily lives. We keep fooling ourselves, with various biases. And the intuition we have, is because we are really amazing biological machines. And even that is subject to error. Unless the intuition is backed by extensive experience. And even then we can easily be fooled. That basically is the gist of their work (to me, so far). I flunked nearly every experiment in Danny Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.2 We need to think slowly, through every implication, when it comes to the few big decisions in life. ...
If Taleb convinced me that Mathematics was beautiful philosophy, Ben Orlin is the one made me fall in love with it. Change is the Only Constant is beautiful and funny at the same time. It’s the story of Calculus over the ages and through domains. It weaves through life and time, through people, interesting and otherwise. And the way Ben tells it, it bears no resemblance to the dry crap that is taught in schools and colleges. It’s beautiful and wonderful, but not paramount and still subject to the vagaries and complexities of life and nature. ...
Really good book. Gave me a new set of mental models. Notes follow. “Focus on the process, not the luck” “Attention is a powerful mitigator to overconfidence: it forces you to constantly reevaluate your knowledge and your game plan, lest you become too tied to a certain course of action. And if you lose? Well, it allows you to admit when it’s actually your fault and not a bad beat” ...
Worked only an hour today. Trying to change the little lookup program, I made the other day, into something a little better. Not quite a good day. Calling it quits early.
Working on Comprehension exercises today. Reflections and Experience I really need feedback, when it comes to programming. I cannot face a blank page. I always seem to start with printing something out to screen and then my brain kind of kicks into gear. Everything after that is just type, print, is this what I expected, if not then fix, type, print … Exercise 3.1 and I think, I am finally getting good handle on comprehensions. from something that would take me at least 10 lines of code to just expressing it concisely in 1! I can read Python messages and take a gander at what I need to do next. I see a '_io.TextIOWrapper' object and know I can iterate over it. I see AttributeError: '_io.TextIOWrapper' object has no attribute 'strip' and realise that it cannot be stripped into parts. I need another way to skin that cat. And then I took it too far (just like this sentence), and nested a comprehension in another one, in where, I had to learn how to put in a conditional in the form of a ternary operator, in Exercise 3.2 (the commented for loop is much simpler!), but that was very good practice. Really stretched me! I caught myself getting distracted a lot. I needed to set a 30 min timer and I spent about 15, looking for where the timer app in my Mint Desktop was, instead of just setting the darned timer on the phone. Took an hour to figure out the comprehension for 3.2 and about 20 minutes to do it for Exercise 3.3. Practice helps! Watching the solutions, and I realise, I got them right in principle, but that I need to be more aware of what happens to an object in memory, so that I can simplify code. I was able to remove one level of comprehension, which I used just to get the end of a string.